I was told by a very intelligent man demanding a trillion dollar salary that you only need vision cameras to have full self driving in all weather conditions. All of this is apparently unnecessary.
He is not wrong, but we demand superhuman performance from our machines which in this case necessitates superhuman sensory abilities. Current evidence shows that having non-vision sensors is a faster way to create a reliable system. I would personally choose to ride in an autonomous vehicle with Lidars.
It seems quite likely that once self driving cars are well perfected, we will demand more than just human level driving which is currently horrendously dangerous. If lidar systems can exceed vision only, we are going to demand it as a baseline standard.
At the Los Angeles Ciclavia two weeks ago Waymo's were getting stuck at the car crossings. There were police standing there waving cars through but the two I saw were not willing to drive through the intersection.
Properly responding to informal hand and voice signals from law enforcement, road workers, and other humans is going to be one of the toughest technical challenges for autonomous vehicles to solve.
Stop signs became universal. No reason why machine readable signals/devices to communicate don’t become the norm with law enforcement and emergency response workers.
Authorization and authentication will be the main challenge to solve here: who is authorized to issue those signals to the automated driver, and how are they authenticated so that malicious actors aren’t able to hijack the automated driver.
Firemen have access keys to various things. You could have a Waymo device for the same that similarly facilitates an override. Or at the very least provides a line with a manual operator that can override on the Waymo side.
We haven't exactly solved that issue for human drivers. People impersonate police in order to commit crimes.
How much more problematic is it with autonomous vehicles? I could see action here just because it is a threat to the property of large corporations, though.
Nah. You're never going to get law enforcement and road workers to reliably use the same signs. My local city hires the lowest bidder to do road repairs. You're lucky if those guys are consistently awake and sober. Autonomous vehicles will have to operate in the real world, not in some idealized utopia where everyone consistently follows written rules.
Waymo already operates in the real world, including construction sites with non standard operating parameters. You can always add on to what the “real world” looks like, because real world isn’t static like you rightly pointed out.
Quite frankly, many drivers don't do well here either since hand signs can be very ambiguous. And many times there are contradictory signals that require interpretation.
Look at Scottie Scheffler's arrest for an extreme case of how very hard this is to get right.
I hope this improves rigor and common sense around winter driving in the USA. In Eastern Europe, drivers care more about tires, angility and driver skill. In the USA , drivers rely on large 4wd vehicles with high clearance for snow and ice driving. I’ve seen way too many issues with large clumsy vehicles losing control due to poor tires .
I hope Waymo shares more solutions for winter driving to debunk a lot of the marketing for winter activity driving in the USA
I don't think the cultural difference you're describing here really exists. Maybe if you mean people from the SF Bay Area who visit Tahoe. If you go to places with real winters, people know about winter / studded tires, will often carry chains, and so on.
Many large 4wd vehicles are nothing special with respect to ground clearance which mostly doesn't make much difference for snow/ice driving on paved roads anyway.
Manufacturers should fit all-weather tires by default (not all-seasons) - they are decent in both summer and snow (3PMSF).
The average car owner seems oblivious to the different types of tires. Most high performance cars come with summer tires. I live in a wealthy area where I often see new cars in parking lots wearing summer tires in winter, probably relying on electronic nannies to mask the lack of grip in normal driving.
The thing about winter driving is that it's just inherently a crapshoot. Sometimes, on a nice morning commute, you hit black ice going downhill and that's that. It doesn't matter that you were going slow, you're still gonna slide and hit something.
I doubt the tech will be immune to that. So it's up to how they manage the fallout from the crashes they end up getting into.
Humans are horrible at this I wonder what the limit is. I've always thought that I can tailor my speed to conditions but not everyone on the road slows down.
It's really interesting because that's something they definitely don't teach you when you first learn to drive. Growing up in Florida, I learned to pull over and turn on emergency blinkers if the rain gets bad enough. The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others. Or maybe I would have learned eventually after a few close calls with skidding. Or maybe I would have never learned until it's too late. I wonder if the different responses to averse conditions you've observed is a function of the different experiences we've had as drivers. You might be a more experienced driver than some of those around you.
And pulling off through a patch of heavy rain is one thing. There are a lot of issues with pulling off in heavy snow unless you can really navigate off the highway to a safe location. Sometimes there aren't great solutions.
Hazard lights are almost never used by folks when driving, when you really should turn them on anytime the conditions are forcing you to not go the speed limit, IMO. The other lizard brains will see blinky lights and hopefully put down their phones so they don't rear end you.
I would hope the other folks would recognize that conditions are such that you're slowing down rather than have a bunch of arbitrary blinking lights on the road.
It's funny because when I lived in Texas, we just turn on windshield wipers on full blast, put the hazard lights on and drive around at 15mph. (This would have to be an epic downpour though.)
The only time people stopped was when it was hailing.. and then they would hide under bridges if they could.
> The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others.
Did you ever hydroplane in a car, even ever so slightly? That experience teaches you to slow down or stop and wait for the rain to be over pretty quickly.
Humans have one advantage over autonomous cars in ice: they can pull over and put on chains. Cars can’t do that (yet).
(I’d love to see a serious winter vehicle that can deploy traction devices by itself, perhaps while rolling at very low speed. Off the top of my head, it seems like it might be easier to put them on then to take them off.)
All the school buses near where I live (Sierra Nevada mountains in California) have these - it's cool to watch them lower and start spinning.
But chains aren't enough in some common situations around here that locals, including school bus drivers, know well. When we get a good size snow storm (multiple feet) and the sun comes out a day or two later, thick ice forms on the sections of road that the sun hits - snow melt runs across the road during the day and freezes at night, getting thicker and smoother each day. When that happens on our steeper inclines, chains on AWD/4WD vehicles are not enough to get up those inclines or to stop on the way down them. Locals know where those spots are and take other routes in those situations. It's hard for me to imagine autonomous vehicles having such local information in remote areas like this anytime soon.
Chains are usually not the best option. Dedicated snow tires are better than chains for most light vehicles when there's snow and ice on the road. For fleet vehicles you would think they could install the proper tires at the depot based on the date or weather forecast.
It's pretty much limited to areas with both snow and lots of elevation changes like in the mountainous areas. Having lived most of my life in the midwest now, no one here uses chains except maybe some of the private snow plow operators driving their trucks around at 4AM. Most people won't use dedicated winter tires either. We tend to rock all seasons all year round. Ice and snow on mostly flat roads are just something you get used to dealing with.
As someone who has lived in New England most of my adult life I've never owned either chains or dedicated snow tires. I do try to be relatively conservative in terms of driving in winter. But I haven't invested in special equipment.
Eh, it's a pretty big distinction weather-wise. Extreme Western New York and the Tug Hill plateau are all susceptible to somewhat frequent lake effect snow. Given the right time of year and wind fetch, you can see narrow convective / lake-effect snow bands from the Finger Lakes. But broadly speaking the actual annual expected snow and the phenomenology of the storm systems that produce that snow are very different over the rest of the state.
Had to drive someone to the Fenway area the other day. And that was bad enough in perfectly reasonable weather :-) I'm OK with driving into the cit(ies) in general but don't regularly go into that area of town.
I was told by a very intelligent man demanding a trillion dollar salary that you only need vision cameras to have full self driving in all weather conditions. All of this is apparently unnecessary.
The vision-only approach surely seems to be falling behind the multi-sensor approach.
He is not wrong, but we demand superhuman performance from our machines which in this case necessitates superhuman sensory abilities. Current evidence shows that having non-vision sensors is a faster way to create a reliable system. I would personally choose to ride in an autonomous vehicle with Lidars.
It seems quite likely that once self driving cars are well perfected, we will demand more than just human level driving which is currently horrendously dangerous. If lidar systems can exceed vision only, we are going to demand it as a baseline standard.
At the Los Angeles Ciclavia two weeks ago Waymo's were getting stuck at the car crossings. There were police standing there waving cars through but the two I saw were not willing to drive through the intersection.
Properly responding to informal hand and voice signals from law enforcement, road workers, and other humans is going to be one of the toughest technical challenges for autonomous vehicles to solve.
Stop signs became universal. No reason why machine readable signals/devices to communicate don’t become the norm with law enforcement and emergency response workers.
Authorization and authentication will be the main challenge to solve here: who is authorized to issue those signals to the automated driver, and how are they authenticated so that malicious actors aren’t able to hijack the automated driver.
Firemen have access keys to various things. You could have a Waymo device for the same that similarly facilitates an override. Or at the very least provides a line with a manual operator that can override on the Waymo side.
We haven't exactly solved that issue for human drivers. People impersonate police in order to commit crimes.
How much more problematic is it with autonomous vehicles? I could see action here just because it is a threat to the property of large corporations, though.
Nah. You're never going to get law enforcement and road workers to reliably use the same signs. My local city hires the lowest bidder to do road repairs. You're lucky if those guys are consistently awake and sober. Autonomous vehicles will have to operate in the real world, not in some idealized utopia where everyone consistently follows written rules.
Waymo already operates in the real world, including construction sites with non standard operating parameters. You can always add on to what the “real world” looks like, because real world isn’t static like you rightly pointed out.
Quite frankly, many drivers don't do well here either since hand signs can be very ambiguous. And many times there are contradictory signals that require interpretation.
Look at Scottie Scheffler's arrest for an extreme case of how very hard this is to get right.
I hope this improves rigor and common sense around winter driving in the USA. In Eastern Europe, drivers care more about tires, angility and driver skill. In the USA , drivers rely on large 4wd vehicles with high clearance for snow and ice driving. I’ve seen way too many issues with large clumsy vehicles losing control due to poor tires .
I hope Waymo shares more solutions for winter driving to debunk a lot of the marketing for winter activity driving in the USA
I don't think the cultural difference you're describing here really exists. Maybe if you mean people from the SF Bay Area who visit Tahoe. If you go to places with real winters, people know about winter / studded tires, will often carry chains, and so on.
Many large 4wd vehicles are nothing special with respect to ground clearance which mostly doesn't make much difference for snow/ice driving on paved roads anyway.
It won't, our economy is somewhat reliant on giant vehicles that people can barely afford to maintain.
Manufacturers should fit all-weather tires by default (not all-seasons) - they are decent in both summer and snow (3PMSF).
The average car owner seems oblivious to the different types of tires. Most high performance cars come with summer tires. I live in a wealthy area where I often see new cars in parking lots wearing summer tires in winter, probably relying on electronic nannies to mask the lack of grip in normal driving.
i’m really curious at what point it decides that it shouldn’t be driving.
Exactly. I picture a dystopia where the car refuses to attempt escape from a storm because of the liability factor.
Sounds preferable to a dystopia where AI driven cars are getting into wrecks because they’re overconfident in their abilities.
The thing about winter driving is that it's just inherently a crapshoot. Sometimes, on a nice morning commute, you hit black ice going downhill and that's that. It doesn't matter that you were going slow, you're still gonna slide and hit something.
I doubt the tech will be immune to that. So it's up to how they manage the fallout from the crashes they end up getting into.
I picture one where it locks the doors and drives you right to the ICE center as soon as the facial recognition cameras realize who you are
even better if this is the only way to get around. no transport for whoever the Trump admin decides is insufficiently loyal!
y'all need to get more creative with your dystopias
> as soon as the facial recognition cameras realize who you are
Based on their current approach, it'll be much simpler than facial recognition.
Humans are horrible at this I wonder what the limit is. I've always thought that I can tailor my speed to conditions but not everyone on the road slows down.
It's really interesting because that's something they definitely don't teach you when you first learn to drive. Growing up in Florida, I learned to pull over and turn on emergency blinkers if the rain gets bad enough. The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others. Or maybe I would have learned eventually after a few close calls with skidding. Or maybe I would have never learned until it's too late. I wonder if the different responses to averse conditions you've observed is a function of the different experiences we've had as drivers. You might be a more experienced driver than some of those around you.
And pulling off through a patch of heavy rain is one thing. There are a lot of issues with pulling off in heavy snow unless you can really navigate off the highway to a safe location. Sometimes there aren't great solutions.
Hazard lights are almost never used by folks when driving, when you really should turn them on anytime the conditions are forcing you to not go the speed limit, IMO. The other lizard brains will see blinky lights and hopefully put down their phones so they don't rear end you.
I would hope the other folks would recognize that conditions are such that you're slowing down rather than have a bunch of arbitrary blinking lights on the road.
It's funny because when I lived in Texas, we just turn on windshield wipers on full blast, put the hazard lights on and drive around at 15mph. (This would have to be an epic downpour though.)
The only time people stopped was when it was hailing.. and then they would hide under bridges if they could.
> The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others.
Did you ever hydroplane in a car, even ever so slightly? That experience teaches you to slow down or stop and wait for the rain to be over pretty quickly.
Humans have one advantage over autonomous cars in ice: they can pull over and put on chains. Cars can’t do that (yet).
(I’d love to see a serious winter vehicle that can deploy traction devices by itself, perhaps while rolling at very low speed. Off the top of my head, it seems like it might be easier to put them on then to take them off.)
Automatic snow chains are a thing, often seen on emergency vehicles even outside of the normal snow band. Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/yus43b/wha...
No idea if they're compatible with Jaguars or whatever Waymo is rolling these days, but my guess is that Waymo could make the economics work.
All the school buses near where I live (Sierra Nevada mountains in California) have these - it's cool to watch them lower and start spinning.
But chains aren't enough in some common situations around here that locals, including school bus drivers, know well. When we get a good size snow storm (multiple feet) and the sun comes out a day or two later, thick ice forms on the sections of road that the sun hits - snow melt runs across the road during the day and freezes at night, getting thicker and smoother each day. When that happens on our steeper inclines, chains on AWD/4WD vehicles are not enough to get up those inclines or to stop on the way down them. Locals know where those spots are and take other routes in those situations. It's hard for me to imagine autonomous vehicles having such local information in remote areas like this anytime soon.
Chains are usually not the best option. Dedicated snow tires are better than chains for most light vehicles when there's snow and ice on the road. For fleet vehicles you would think they could install the proper tires at the depot based on the date or weather forecast.
Outside of some specific areas, how many people do you think carry chains with them?
It's pretty much limited to areas with both snow and lots of elevation changes like in the mountainous areas. Having lived most of my life in the midwest now, no one here uses chains except maybe some of the private snow plow operators driving their trucks around at 4AM. Most people won't use dedicated winter tires either. We tend to rock all seasons all year round. Ice and snow on mostly flat roads are just something you get used to dealing with.
As someone who has lived in New England most of my adult life I've never owned either chains or dedicated snow tires. I do try to be relatively conservative in terms of driving in winter. But I haven't invested in special equipment.
when the remote operator watching five feeds notices it's doing something dangerous
> Upstate New York
I'm guessing they meant _Upstate AND Western New York_.
Glad someone in Waymo saw the potential for testing for extreme snowy conditions there.
Yes. We went to Buffalo, and a few other locations (https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/15/waymo-to-double-down-on-wi... and other reports)
Anecdotally I feel like the Upstate vs. Western NY distinction is mostly only made by people who live there.
When I lived in NYC I used "upstate" to mean anything not in the five boroughs, Long Island or Westchester, and I don't think this usage is uncommon.
Eh, it's a pretty big distinction weather-wise. Extreme Western New York and the Tug Hill plateau are all susceptible to somewhat frequent lake effect snow. Given the right time of year and wind fetch, you can see narrow convective / lake-effect snow bands from the Finger Lakes. But broadly speaking the actual annual expected snow and the phenomenology of the storm systems that produce that snow are very different over the rest of the state.
dragnet which is LPRs for fleet vehicles
boston: the ultimate test
Had to drive someone to the Fenway area the other day. And that was bad enough in perfectly reasonable weather :-) I'm OK with driving into the cit(ies) in general but don't regularly go into that area of town.